Leadership 2050: Critical Challenges, Key Contexts, and Emerging Trends

The book begins with a section delving into foresight analysis, strategic foresight, and scenario planning. It then examines the pressing contexts and most wicked problems facing future leaders ranging from population growth and urbanization to climate change and resource competition. How can leaders create common cause and meet these issues with an eye toward peace, sustainability, and social justice? The book concludes with a series of unique ways of viewing the critical challenges facing leaders and suggests how skillsets and capacities needed to work on solutions to these challenges might be developed.Leadership 2050 helps us think at once about the demands our world is likely to face in the next thirty-five years and the leadership our communities and organizations will need to both survive those challenges and thrive.

"This book points ahead to the important work to be done in every realm of our lives throughout the globalizing world: families working to survive and thrive in challenging conditions, businesses in complex environments tackling tough trade-offs squaring values of profitability, long-term sustainability and social justice; and public organizations, nonprofits, and social entrepreneurs working to build collaborative capacity across boundaries to transform cultures of dependency into communities of engaged citizenship and distributed leadership." - Ronald Heifetz, Founding Director of the Center for Public Leadership and the King Hussein bin Talal Senior Lecturer in Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School

"The authors of this edited volume go where others fear to tread. They are to be commended first for recognizing that leadership and followership change over time – and second for using their expertise to project what leadership and followership might look like decades from now. Though as the editor himself admits, “prediction is very difficult, especially about the future,” this book is a worthy look into an admittedly cloudy crystal ball." - Barbara Kellerman, James MacGregor Burns Lecturer in Leadership, Harvard Kennedy School

"Leadership 2050 exemplifies effective collaboration between scholars and practitioners in two distinct fields—Strategic Foresight and Leadership. Together, the contributors to this volume illuminate the challenges leaders will face over the next 35 years. Much like the World Future Society, Leadership 2050 promotes awareness of the changing context for leadership and encourages creative solutions. It is a wonderful resource for leaders in all contexts looking to respond effectively to a complex and still emergent conditions. I heartily endorse!" - Amy Zalman, CEO & President, World Future Society

"In 1970, futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler observed, “Change is the way the future invades our lives.” This book affirms that leadership is the way we invade the future. The foresight needed to engage in the complexity and demand of “wicked” global problems that become adaptive challenges, the transcendent perspective of being people flourishing in socially just relationships built on trust, and envisioning the expanding digital age, all coalesce in this book. This book is a must read for leaders in all sectors and leadership scholars and educators in all disciplines as a framework to think critically together about these global challenges." - Susan R. Komives, Professor Emerita, University of Maryland

"From global crises to corporate and community concerns, the effective use of personal influence and sanctioned authority today are being challenged and reshaped by new technologies and major shifts in attitudes and expectations. Leadership 2050 offers a broad yet solidly researched overview of key issues and influences most likely to dominate the global social, political and economic landscape in the decades ahead. This is a book to guide and inspire anyone, from CEO to private citizen, who faces the important task of shaping sound long-range plans, while earning and preserving the trust of co-workers and the public. Any leader who deserves the title can profit from the insights and ideas found in Leadership 2050." - Lane Jennings, Managing Editor, World Future Review

"The past 35 years of leadership studies are strewn with achievements. This book is one of them and suggests the best may be yet to come. It is interdisciplinary work at its finest and brings future studies into the mix of its myriad sources. It culls vision and value from the current state of leadership scholarship to emphasize a leadership premised on interconnectedness, peace, sustainability, justice, and social organizations as living dynamic systems. It combined accessibility and solid research makes it ideal for classroom and discussion groups. It faces “wicked problems” that lie ahead of us